The Tsotsobe Saga - A dream turned into nightmare

South African cricket has suffered from its fair share of squabbles, disappointments and tragedies, probably no more and no less than any other cricket playing country. There's been Graeme Smith's premature retirement and the fluke injury to Mark Boucher's eye; there's been the domestic match-fixing scandal and the profound disappointment of a Johannesburg-educated New Zealander called Grant Elliott pulverising Dale Steyn in the World Cup semi-final in 2015, a team tinkered with by the CSA's suits to ameliorate the politicians.

Then there's the Lonwabo Tsotsobe saga, a tragedy arguably more resonant than all the other mayhem and mishaps put together. Its resonance partly comes from Tsotsobe's hubris, his apparent inability to learn from his mistakes, but it also comes from the context in which he found himself. Time and time again, Tsotsobe was cut slack or apologised for or given another chance. Cricket SA and his franchise employers were often prepared to make excuses or look the other way. Unused to the political horse-trading and necessary compromises of the local scene, however, foreign employers didn't prove quite so accommodating.

In 2011, for example, Essex scored a significant coup when they signed Tsotsobe as their overseas professional. But after taking just five wickets in three championship matches at an average of 77.6, and conceding more than six runs per over in five one-day outings, he was dropped to the second XI. It was an embarrassing turn of events for a gun international cricketer who arrived with a glowing reputation.

An outburst on Twitter, in which Tsotsobe described his stay at Chelmsford as "the worst two months of my life", proved the final straw. When his departure was officially confirmed, Essex coach Paul Grayson revealed the left-armer had arrived in England big on attitude and thin on pretty much everything else. "His work rate and attitude haven't been up to the standard I would expect of someone with his experience," said Grayson. Little did he know it then but the Essex debacle was to prove the beginning of a nosedive Tstotsobe would never get out of.

To understand the arc of Tsotsobe's decline and fall, it's first necessary to have a deeper appreciation of his talents. When he made his international debut in Perth in January 2009, South African cricket fans could scarcely believe their luck. Their team had recently won its first Test series in Australia - in some of the most dramatic circumstances imaginable - and had been leading 3-1 in the one-day series before the 24-year-old entered the scene alongside Wayne Parnell.

For years South Africa had yearned for a left-armer to add variety to their attack, and now they had two of them making accomplished debuts in a crushing victory. Better yet, Tsotsobe was a black African. Pure gold dust.

He took 4 for 50 in that match, including the key dismissal of Michael Hussey for 78 to derail Australia's chase. Over the next two years, with Ntini heading in the opposite direction, Tsotsobe became an integral part of South Africa's one-day team, averaging a shade over 20 and taking career-best figures of 4 for 22 against India at the Wanderers.

Yet it was the prospect of a left-armer in the Test side that excited South Africans most - someone to complement the right-arm pace of Dale Steyn, the bounce of Morne Morkel and the bat-thudding consistency of Jacques Kallis.

Although the selectors turned to Parnell first, they opted to give Tsotsobe his first Test cap during a two-match series in the West Indies in June 2010. He only took two wickets, but proved frugal, holding up an end while Steyn and Morkel wreaked havoc at the other. He was retained for the three-match series against India later that year, and took 5 for 83 in the second Test.

Then came the Essex saga in April and May 2011.

When the South African Test team re-gathered next - for a two-match series against Australia in November 2011 - Vernon Philander cracked the nod, having hoovered up domestic wickets around the country at an indecent rate the previous season. When 47 all-out happened on the back of Philander's 5 for 15, the Tsotsobe Test dream drained swiftly from the public imagination. He never played another Test, which many see as a shame.

"He was a very talented bowler," says Gordon Parsons, the bowling coach at the Lions where Tsotsobe played his last three seasons of domestic cricket. "Let's get that straight from the start. He had height, pace - when he wanted - and he had that priceless ability to bring the ball back to the right-hander. As a package, he had all the skills. He could hit the stumps 10 times in 20 to 25 deliveries, which is pretty good. Most fast bowlers take 30 to 35 deliveries to do the same thing.

"On the down side, his fielding was dreadful and he was only moderate with the bat, although he could have been better had he been prepared to work. The problem was that he never really pushed himself out of his comfort zone and increasingly four-day cricket became a bit of a drag. It was a shame because here was someone who had the talent to play 50 Tests for South Africa."

At the same time that Tsotsobe's Test hopes slipped quietly into the night, his one-day career blossomed. Bowling left-arm over the wicket from a good height, he struck on a length to right-handers that often appeared unplayable, with the angle away from the batsman making scoring nigh impossible. In eight ODIs against Sri Lanka and New Zealand across 2011/12, he took 17 wickets at less than 20 and an economy rate of 4.5 runs per over.

At 28, he appeared to have found his niche as well as his mojo. He might have lost his Test place to Philander but they were similar bowlers, and the changing of the Test guard didn't prevent others from comparing the two. "You're always looking to get slightly more pace out of a fast-bowler, but I thought that Lonwabo was the ideal pace for what he did - a little bit like Vernon Philander," says Piet Botha, who worked with Tsotsobe at the Warriors. "The advantage for him was that he was the kind of pace that would draw a batsman into a shot, and that's where his wickets came from, where, say, someone like Dale Steyn was quicker and batters would hang back in the crease to him just that little bit. Lonwabo was probably the ideal pace for what he did because he encouraged you to attempt the shot."

Another superb home season in 2012-13 saw him hold onto top spot in the ODI rankings until May 2013. But murmurings of a poor attitude continued to dog him. His stay at the Dolphins lasted just one season after the franchise's management became irked over how rarely he seemed to be available. He played just nine 50-over games for them in 2012-13, and no first-class or Twenty20 matches. Unspecified "family commitments" often got in the way.

In July 2013, he was picked for South Africa's one-day tour of Sri Lanka but failed a fitness test. Frantic behind-the-scenes wrangling by CSA's transformation head, amongst others, meant that he still toured as CSA attempted to airbrush the episode by claiming that his often troublesome ankle had flared up upon arrival in Sri Lanka.

He was pushed hard by CSA's fitness coaches upon arriving, missing the first two matches, but was excellent in the third ODI, taking four for 22 in seven overs, which helped to restrict Sri Lanka to 167 batting second, as the Proteas won by 56 runs. Tsotsobe played in matches four and five but was less effective. South Africa lost the series 4-1.

On South Africa's return, coach Russell Domingo said that Tsotsobe had "learnt a lesson", and it showed in an improved work ethic the next season. A solid ODI series against Pakistan was followed by India's visit, in which he took 4 for 25 in the second ODI.

And yet, the third ODI in that series, in December 2013, would be his last for South Africa. After a disappointing World Twenty20 campaign in Bangladesh next March, which included conceding 1 for 46 as the Netherlands threatened an upset, Tsotsobe underwent ankle surgery. He wouldn't play for the Proteas again.

His lack of commitment to four-day cricket the following season was clear - as the Lions swept to the Sunfoil Series title, he played just twice. Some impressive outings in the one-day format were enough for him to make South Africa's provisional 30-man squad for the 2015 World Cup, but in truth the Proteas had moved on. With questionable commitment and a ropey ankle, the world's leading ODI bowler three seasons ago had caused himself such reputational damage that when his name came up, people invariably changed the topic of conversation.

Tsotsobe's fall from grace made him vulnerable to anxieties about his future, anxieties shared by his house-mate, Thami Tsolekile, captain of the Lions franchise where both played. One can only imagine what course conversations around the dinner table followed, with Tsotsobe's career quietly going off the rails and Tsolekile nursing an even sharper sense of grievance. He had been led to believe that he might be a worthy successor to Mark Boucher after Boucher's horrendous eye injury at Taunton in 2012. Gary Kirsten said as much in the press. Nothing, though, came to pass, with Kirsten apparently changing his mind. Future wicket-keeping duties passed between AB de Villiers, Dane Vilas and Quinton de Kock depending on occasion and format.

As the house-mates wondered about the coming season in the winter of 2015, Gulam Bodi, a former colleague who hadn't been re-contracted by the Lions, was bumbling his way to a match-fixing scheme. He used a pre-season tournament for semi-professional teams called the Africa T20 to get a feel for players' willingness to fix matches in the upcoming RAM SLAM T20 and although neither Tsotsobe nor Tsolekile played in the Africa T20, eventually news of Bodi's escapades reached eager ears.

Indeed, Tsolekile became pivotal. He was the Lions captain, and therefore capable of changing batting line-ups and bowling orders. Specific details are hard to come by but without a Lions contract, Bodi ceded control to Tsolekile who conspired to fix matches in the RAM SLAM T20, a tournament beamed live into India. By means of press release in early December 2015, CSA alerted the press and public that something was amiss in the unfolding competition, although details were sketchy. In January Bodi was named as the "mastermind" behind the attempted fixing and, at much the same time, we wrote a small story for The Guardian, naming Tsolekile as one of the implicated players. By that stage Tsotsobe, with an injury likely to have been less serious than everyone pretended, had upped and left Johannesburg. He hasn't played cricket since. We asked him why in the following telephone transcript from February 24, 2016.

We understand that you are one of the players being investigated in the match-fixing scandal for accepting money from Gulam Bodi.

[Threatening] From what?

We understand that you're one of the players being investigated in the match-fixing saga.

Oh yeah.

Would you like to comment on that?

No, but I think I heard you saying (it was) for accepting money from Gulam Bodi.

Yeah.

Where did you get that?

We can't tell you who our sources are, but we've spoken to several people who have confirmed you are being investigated.

I'm being investigated or I've accepted money?

That you're being investigated for accepting money.

Huh, okay.

Maybe you can clarify that. We're asking for your side of the story.

Well there's one thing that I can say, and I think I've said it before, is that there's a lot speculation going around. I'm not going to entertain anything, but CSA can do anything they want to check if we did any match-fixing with the people that they're investigating. So we'll just wait for them and see.

We also just wanted to ask about your absence from the Lions for the last two months.

Mmmhmmm.

We believe you left Johannesburg quite unexpectedly in December, and you haven't played for a couple of months. Can we ask why that is?

Well the people that are feeding you guys things, they're actually feeding you the wrong information.

Okay.

I don't know whether they're getting money from you guys or what, but they're talking absolute rubbish. So... I just feel that there's a lot that's going on in my life. I've spoken to the coach and he's the one who's given me the off-time, so I don't have to explain myself to any other person. If the CEO and the coach know what's going on, then I think I'm cool. You know? So the guys that are feeding you information must make sure that they have their sources and get the right information out.

Okay, sure. Can I ask you one further thing: have you been fully cooperating with the investigation?

Well I've given them everything they want.

Have you given them all that information at the time that they wanted?

We'll hear from them. I can't... I can't... That I don't know. That's why I'm also waiting.

You seemed to take quite strong exception to the notion that you accepted money from Gulam Bodi. Are you denying that?

So basically you're saying that I accepted money from Gulam?

I'm asking you to confirm or deny that.

[Stuttering] The thing that I'm saying is, if there's evidence that I've taken money from Gulam, they must show the evidence. Because now it also seems like you're coming to me and saying that I've accepted money from Gulam. Well, hearing from your source.

Yes.

Whatever that source of yours is telling you, he must come up with the evidence, or there could be major problems because you must understand that my image is in line, and I could basically lose my job. So they better be careful what they say, and what they write in papers, because I've sat down with my lawyer and I've discussed this in depth.

Yep. And would it be fair to say that if you didn't accept the money, you did meet with Indian gentlemen and you certainly spoke to Gulam about possibly getting involved?

Well that, that...that we can discuss with Cricket South Africa. If you guys want to know anything more about all this, what's going on now, you can ask them. Because we were told not to comment on anything.

They have a policy of not commenting at all, which is why we're coming to you to hear your side of events.

Yeah so. If you want to find out more, you must talk to CSA.

When Chris Giliomee, the lawyer Tsotsobe refers to in the transcript above, was contacted by Cricbuzz recently, he confirmed that the Johannesburg legal firm for whom he works had walked away from the case. He added that Tsotsobe had an outstanding bill, although he said that this was not significant. Tsotsobe's current lawyers are D. Gouws Incorporated of Port Elizabeth, with Danie Gouws confirming that he had received a three-man Anti-Corruption Unit delegation from CSA just last week. He declined to furnish details of the meeting, but did say matters would shortly be clarified through a press release. It arrived on Tuesday (July 11) as he predicted it would, and carried the news that his client has been suspended for eight years backdated to April 2017. Amidst the more serious breaches of conduct according to the press release is the fact that Tsotsobe conspired to fix a match in the RAM SLAM T20 of 2015-16.

Of all those suspended (including Tsolekile and Alviro Petersen, as well as Jean Symes, Ethy Mbhalathi, Pumi Matshikwe and Bodi himself) the Tsotsobe matter has been the most convoluted. A source close to the Lions confirmed that the franchise were leaned upon to offer him a contract for the 2016-17 season and acquiesced by offering him the bare minimum, which he refused. As well as unpaid legal bills and changing legal firms, there have long been suspicions of interference in the case from the former minister of sport, Fikile Mbalula.

It was Mbalula who sourced Giliomee's legal firm, for example, and there appears to be a sinister element to the final piece in the match-fixing jigsaw. We can only hazard a guess as to why the players concerned felt it necessary to attempt what they did. CSA might have secured their convictions; those implicated have been successfully brought to brook. But we might never know the 'why' of the matter, an answer which would bring us to a closer understanding of how seven lauded South African cricketers chose to step into the dark side never to return.